There are people in this country that will swear to you that there is no such thing as racism or better yet institutional racism. Why? Because they have the privilege of living in a world where it simply doesn’t exist. If it’s never been pointed in your direction then it doesn’t exist right? Wrong.
Just because it doesn’t ever knock on your door doesn’t mean that it’s not knocking on doors in the neighborhood and pushing over trash cans.
I tell folks all of the time that we live in the same country on the same street breathing the same air many times but we don’t live in the same world. Not only does it happen in the real world but it happens in sports as well.
As black people, we’re so accustomed to it happening that we can sometimes be overly sensitive to it and be ready to call it when it may not be that. I had cats hitting me up about the differences in the fines of Portland’s Mario Hezonjia and Boston’s Marcus Smart this week for their exchanges with the refs.
Hezonjia was fined $25K for grabbing referee Kevin Scott’s arm. Ole boy was literally trying to keep the ref from blowing his whistle to call a technical foul on his teammate CJ McCollum. McCollum was hot because of the call the ref had just made so he was giving the official some lip. So when Hezonjia grabbed the ref’s arm all of the brothers were like “Whoa bruh!! If that were one of us we’d get hit with a hefty fine, suspended or both.” And that is definitely true playa!!!!
Once they hit him with the fine for $25K I was cool with it because it made sense. He wasn’t trying to fight the ref he just tried to keep him from blowing the whistle. That’s an expensive grab with no intent. He may as well have fired on him if it was going to cost him $25K. A grab with no intent was stupid.
Then Smart gets hit with a $35K fine for confronting and verbally abusing refs. At that point every brother in the barber shop was hot. “Smart gets hit for 10 racks more than Hezonjia for yelling at the refs? That’s BS!!!”
When I heard it initially I was like “Dang bruh! That’s not right!” Then I looked at the tape. Ole boy was pointing at the refs trying to charge at them whether he was going to really do something or not was irrelevant. He was calling them all kinds of whatever like he was about to scrap if not retrained. I mean ole boy went to the projects on them and pulled out the biggest hood trick in the book.
Now I know as well as every brother watching that foolishness knows that Smart wasn’t about to do a darn thing if they had let him go. Why? Because we know that he’s not crazy. He knows where his bread is buttered. However, the white cat watching this foolishness doesn’t know that because he didn’t grow up in the hood. He doesn’t know that trick.
Completely jump out of the birthday cake on a boy that you know isn’t about that life just to scare him. It works 90 percent of the time but you don’t pull it out on the job.
Therefore, if we’re going to keep it real or all the way 100, whichever comes 1st! Marcus Smart got hit for the additional $10K for being stupid enough to run that trick at work. I would have fined him 20 racks more because he should have known better.
So my response to the fellas in the barber shop is “C’mon playas, Smart was on one and it cost him. We gotta live with that one.” There’s no comparing what Hezonjia did to what Smart did even though one made contact and the other didn’t.
Sure, you can’t put your hands on the refs even to keep a boy from blowing his whistle but you dang sure can’t try to fight them. Again, I doubt very seriously if Smart was going to touch them if he wasn’t retrained because that was an old hood trick to intimidate a boy. Now he knows that that foolishness will cost him in the NBA.
We all know that racism exists but sometimes we’ve got to see some situations for what they are. Smart was on one and it cost him. Live with it. Stop me when I start lyin’!